In the five years since it debuted, one of the most common reactions to Charlie Brooker’sBlack Mirror has been a chilling sense of familiarity. The British anthology series is beloved for its ability to zero in on the most prescient modern technological fears, from mass surveillance and biohacking to V.R. and cyberbullying, and take them to terrifying conclusions with alarming accuracy; the premises of severalepisodes have, more or less, actually come true. In just seven episodes—and with six more arriving on Netflix this Friday—Black Mirror has presented some of the most compelling and enduring dystopias 21st-century pop culture has to offer.

On the surface, this makes perfect sense. The public has always eaten up stories like these; in its first year, George Orwell’s 1984, perhaps the most famous dystopian vision in history next to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, sold 50,000 hardback copies in the U.K. and more than 300,000 copies in the U.S.

Of course, the world today would be all too familiar to the dystopian prophets of generations past. More than 80 years after Huxley warned of a genetically engineered, pharmaceutically controlled society, we’ve learned how to edit DNA and medicate most behavioral disorders. In the 50 years since Philip K. Dick envisioned a permanently over-polluted world where people need devices to feel empathy, we’ve nearly killed the Great Barrier Reef and have become consumed by social media.

And that’s to say nothing of politics: “Some of the criticisms of [‘The Waldo Moment,’ in which a cartoon bear runs for office] were that they didn’t think a character that crude and basic would ever catch on,” Brooker recently said. “You would never accept Donald Trump as a work of original fiction . . . it would be panned as way too implausible. I have no idea where political satire goes after this.”

All the while, we’ve been hungrily devouring dystopian fiction, turning the concept into a multi-billion-dollar, often meta, and ultimately ubiquitous juggernaut; it’s become part of us even as we’ve apparently grown sick of it. We exist in a world in which the singularity has come and gone: our everyday reality is as disturbing as the exaggerated nightmares of satirical fictions past, if not more. So why do we still eat up stories like the ones told in Black Mirror—which forecast even more horrific and uncomfortably likely futures on the horizon?

Put simply: we’re beyond saving. Traditionally, the dystopian genre was a tool of the few to awaken the many: educated, politically active writers would greatly exaggerate the conditions and beliefs they viewed as dangerous to their most logical, if extreme, ends. These worlds were meant as metaphors that encouraged the masses to think about those issues in a more critical way—in short, they were meant to shake a sleeping public awake.

But most will agree that we’ve been wide awake for some time now. And while new visions of the future are terrifying, we’ve learned that being awake isn’t enough to stop them from coming true. Still, our familiarity with those conclusions has also become oddly comforting.

Today, Brooker and his Black Mirror writers don’t have to stray far to find a worst-case scenario to explore. A medically sedated population or a totalitarian bureaucratic society might have felt like a chilling premonition in decades past, but stories like *Brave New World *and 1984—and even Margaret Atwood’sThe Handmaid’s Tale, as late as 1985—were constructed largely of warnings. Though stories about made-to-order robots that look like your dead lover and implants that record and catalog your entire existence are meant to evoke the same lurching horror, that horror lies not in what we could become, but what we already are. We’re past believing that existential irony can scare our society into change; Brooker and his team aren’t even pretending that Black Mirror is satire anymore. Instead, they’ve admitted that several of the stories contained in Season 3 are intentionally modeled after real services and technological advances; plenty more will most certainly be adopted and deployed, purposely or not, by the tech industry in the coming years. They don’t want to prevent these things from happening—we all know we probably can’t.

But don’t mistake Black Mirror for nihilism. Though a number of critics over the years have accused Brooker of technophobia, claiming his series sees our devices as a pox that strips us of our humanity, that label implies that we don’t already believe this ourselves. What we lack is a way to articulate and explore what the end stages of that disease might look like—which is where Brooker and Co. come in. Though they were once political Trojan horses, vehicles like Black Mirror have become trusted companions, despite their horrors—or perhaps more accurately, because of them. We know that things generally won’t end well for Black Mirror’s jealous husbands and bewildered prey, but we’re still able to use the show to navigate and talk through the dystopia we live in now—the one we actively created, in spite of all those literary warnings. Think of the series as a literal nightmare: a disturbing creation of the human subconscious that actually helps us work through our current anxieties and fears in a productive way.

Perhaps Black Mirror is the only version of the dystopian genre that can survive in a world like this without losing its potential to affect the course of our lives and culture: instead of scaring us or forcing us to think about uncomfortable societal consequences, it bolsters our sanity and braces us to exist in the reality in which we already live. Black Mirror is an antidote: its installments exist to validate our fears, to relieve us of the feeling that the world is already insane. In a world that tries to gaslight a largemajority of us on a daily basis, this is a different, extremely valuable sort of relief. Staying alert to what we do and who we are has never been so crucial, now that our own hellscape seems to be digging in for the long haul. We are no longer unsure about whether we can prevent society’s descent into madness. As Black Mirror so aptly reminds us, we’re already here.

Claire Foy is photographed for her portrait as Queen Elizabeth II in full regalia, in what the Queen wore to her coronation ceremony in 1953. Foy portrays a young but steadfast Elizabeth as she assumes the throne at the age of 25.

Photo: Photograph by Julian Broad.

A car fit for a king! Julian Broad captures a brooding Matt Smith (best known as Doctor Who) in his role as a youthful Prince Philip, the Queen’s husband. In preparation for the part, Smith gleaned inside information by talking to a former officer of the British royal household.

Photo: Photograph by Julian Broad.

Foy, whose performance as Ann Boleyn in Wolf Hall earned her a BAFTA nomination, is equally magnificent in her latest turn as Queen of England.

Photo: Photograph by Julian Broad.

Vanessa Kirby plays Princess Margaret, the Queen’s late sister and her closest confidante. Kirby presents Margaret in a more vivacious and sultry light—a side of her character less exposed and commonly explored when depicting the royal sisters.

John Lithgow stars as the indomitable Winston Churchill, whose relationship with the Queen (almost 50 years his junior) as prime minister was the stimulus from which the entire series developed. Lithgow trained for hours with a dialect coach in order to perfect his rendering of perhaps the 20th century’s most famed British orator.

Photo: Photograph by Julian Broad.

The principal cast is photographed here on location at Lancaster House in London. Eileen Atkins and Victoria Hamilton star alongside Kirby, Foy, and Smith as Queen Mary (Elizabeth’s grandmother) and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

Photo: Photograph by Julian Broad.

Claire Foy is photographed for her portrait as Queen Elizabeth II in full regalia, in what the Queen wore to her coronation ceremony in 1953. Foy portrays a young but steadfast Elizabeth as she assumes the throne at the age of 25.

Photograph by Julian Broad.

A car fit for a king! Julian Broad captures a brooding Matt Smith (best known as Doctor Who) in his role as a youthful Prince Philip, the Queen’s husband. In preparation for the part, Smith gleaned inside information by talking to a former officer of the British royal household.

Photograph by Julian Broad.

Foy, whose performance as Ann Boleyn in Wolf Hall earned her a BAFTA nomination, is equally magnificent in her latest turn as Queen of England.

Photograph by Julian Broad.

Vanessa Kirby plays Princess Margaret, the Queen’s late sister and her closest confidante. Kirby presents Margaret in a more vivacious and sultry light—a side of her character less exposed and commonly explored when depicting the royal sisters.

John Lithgow stars as the indomitable Winston Churchill, whose relationship with the Queen (almost 50 years his junior) as prime minister was the stimulus from which the entire series developed. Lithgow trained for hours with a dialect coach in order to perfect his rendering of perhaps the 20th century’s most famed British orator.

Photograph by Julian Broad.

The principal cast is photographed here on location at Lancaster House in London. Eileen Atkins and Victoria Hamilton star alongside Kirby, Foy, and Smith as Queen Mary (Elizabeth’s grandmother) and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.